Top Projects: Union Depot

Parts of Union Depot, finished in 1923, were in good shape, but other sections needed drastic repair. (Staff photo: Bill Klotz)

Address: 214 E. Fourth St., St. Paul

Project cost: $243 million

Project size: 33 acres

Owner: Ramsey County Regional Railroad Authority

Contractor: Mortenson Construction

Architect: HGA Architects & Engineers

Engineers: URS Corp.

Editor’s note: This is the 24th installment in F&C’s Top Projects of 2012 Series. Previous profiles are available here.

Union Depot’s $243 million renovation restored the building’s historic architecture while incorporating new structural elements that create a multimodal transit center where trains, buses, light rail and bikes will converge.

The project, which started construction in 2011, generated 4,400 jobs for contractors who renovated and furnished the 27,000-square-foot waiting room, built a new entrance and parking areas off Kellogg Boulevard East, and totally reworked the track area.

The project presented a major engineering challenge in trying to bring together all the transportation modes. “There’s rail, but there’s also buses that will use the old rail deck, and there’s bicycles and potential future light rail,” said Greg Brown, project manager at Minneapolis-based URS Corp. “We had to design things for today plus what’s envisioned as possibilities years from now.”

That would have been simpler in a new structure, he conceded. Parts of Union Depot, finished in 1923, were in good shape, but other sections needed drastic repair. About 10 percent of the 300,000-square-foot train deck — an area on which trains travel into the station — had to be replaced and reconfigured to allow for buses, he said. In addition, the deck has a recreational trail that will connect to the Bruce Vento Trail.

Union Depot will likely receive a LEED “Gold” certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) from the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council. More than 95 percent of construction waste was diverted from landfills, and 70 percent of the power came from renewable sources.

Although not by any measure the largest project ever completed by URS, Union Depot’s restoration was still large in scope.

“This is an interesting combination of fine detail and scale,” Brown said. “You had to be sensitive to history. And everything was on a big scale — 30,000 square feet of this, 50,000 square feet of that. You had to pay attention to a level of detail that was not common in my experience.”

See below for a slideshow of Union Depot by F&C staff photographer Bill Klotz: